Videos

[Video] How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine: All-Demo Edition

Last Updated May 18, 2020

How to Think Like the SQL Server Engine, Videos

You’ve heard of my free How to Think Like the Engine class, and maybe you even started watching it, but…it has slides, and you hate slides. Wanna see me do the whole thing in Management Studio, starting with an empty query window and writing the whole thing out from scratch live? This session is for you.…

[Video] The Database Community is Bigger Than It Looks.

Last Updated May 14, 2020

Brent Ozar

Videos

Right now, in times like this with insane amounts of change, it can feel like you’re alone, especially as a data professional. You’re not. In this 16-minute Twitch live stream, I explain how data professionals can feel so isolated and alone even in a good year, let alone a really challenging year like this.

[Video] How Can I Measure If My Database Does More Reads Than Writes?

Last Updated April 5, 2020

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration, Videos

When someone asks you, “Is this database read-intensive or write-intensive?” you probably look at sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats to measure the file activity – but that isn’t really correct. After all, your users run a lot of queries all day that are simply satisfied from the buffer pool. SQL Server caches your data so it doesn’t have to hit…

[Video] Watch Brent Work on sp_Blitz

Last Updated April 5, 2020

Brent Ozar

sp_Blitz, Videos

During the quarantines, I’m looking for new ways to help you level up for free. I decided to start live-streaming whenever I’m working on things I can share with you publicly. I wanted to add a new check to sp_Blitz, so I figured I’d do it live on camera while you watch, and talk you…

[Video] What Percent Complete Is That Index Build?

Last Updated March 24, 2020

Brent Ozar

Index Maintenance, SQL Server 2017, Videos

SQL Server 2017 & newer have a new DMV, sys.index_resumable_operations, that show you the percent_completion for index creations and rebuilds. It works, but…only if the data isn’t changing. But of course your data is changing – that’s the whole point of doing these operations as resumable. If they weren’t changing, we could just let the operations…

“Working” From Home? Watch A Bunch of Free SQL Server Videos on YouTube.

Last Updated March 13, 2020

Brent Ozar

Videos

You’re new at this working from home thing, and you’re trying to put Game of Thrones up on a second monitor while you work? Listen, that’s not gonna play out well. You’re gonna get distracted and you’re not gonna get any work done. Instead, if you’re gonna have something in the background, learn about SQL…

[Video] Watch Brent Tune Queries

Last Updated January 31, 2020

Brent Ozar

Execution Plans, Videos

Ever wonder somebody else does it? Watch over my shoulder as I spend 9 minutes in PowerPoint explaining the big picture, and then about 40 minutes working on this stored procedure in the StackOverflow2013 database: If you enjoy that, the Watch Brent Tune Queries page has another video and other query examples. Enjoy!

[Video] What’s New in SQL Server 2019

Last Updated June 25, 2020

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2019, Videos

We must be getting pretty close to the official release of Microsoft SQL Server 2019. There are less than 80 days left in the year. (Interestingly, it’s been almost 60 days since Release Candidate 1 shipped – that’s unusually long for a delay between builds. Hmm.) With the clock ticking down, now’s a good time…

[Video] Help! SQL Server 2008 is Still Here!

Last Updated July 9, 2019

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2008, Videos

Your company is ignoring the news: SQL Server 2008 and 2008R2 are officially out of support as of today, but nothing’s changing at your company. You still have SQL Server 2008 in production, and you’re a little nervous. How should you approach the conversations with management? Brent Ozar will help: he’s been there too, fighting…

Using Implicit Transactions? You Really Need RCSI.

Last Updated July 8, 2019

Brent Ozar

Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels, Videos

Implicit transactions are a hell of a bad idea in SQL Server: they require you to micromanage your transactions, staying on top of every single thing in code. If you miss just one little DELETE/UPDATE/INSERT operation and don’t commit it quickly enough, you can have a blocking firestorm. The ideal answer is to stop using…

[Video] Demoing SQL Server 2019’s new Accelerated Database Recovery

Last Updated October 15, 2019

Brent Ozar

SQL Server 2019, Videos

Wouldn’t it be nice if rollbacks just finished instantly? Wouldn’t you love for startup times to be near-zero even when SQL Server crashed just as someone in the middle of a transaction? How much would you pay for all this? (Well, I’m a little afraid to ask that, since we don’t know yet whether this…

[Video] How to Capture Baselines with sp_BlitzFirst

Last Updated October 15, 2019

Brent Ozar

Monitoring, sp_BlitzFirst, Videos

Everybody tells you to capture baselines – but what exactly are you supposed to capture? Which Perfmon counters matter? How do you track which data files are growing, and which ones are slow? How can you track which queries are using the most resources? All you have to do is install the free, open source…

[Video] An Introduction to GitHub for DBAs

Last Updated February 8, 2019

Brent Ozar

Development, Videos

Distributed source control is really intimidating: branches, pull requests, merges – will somebody just take my code, for crying out loud? Why does it have to be so complicated and involved? I’m with you: I hated GitHub. For years, I struggled with it, but I’ve come to a gradual truce. I’m not a GitHub pro…

[Video] Getting Started with the Consultant Toolkit

Last Updated February 1, 2019

Brent Ozar

Consultant Toolkit, Videos

You’re a consultant who needs to figure out why your clients’ SQL Servers are slow and unreliable. You’ve collected a bunch of diagnostic queries over the years, but they have a lot of holes, and you don’t really have the time to maintain them – let alone make ’em better. You waste time connecting to…

How to Think Like the Engine – 2019 Edition

Last Updated January 25, 2019

Brent Ozar

Indexing, SQL Server, Videos

You’re a developer or a DBA, and you’re comfortable writing queries to get the data you need. You’re much less comfortable trying to design the right indexes for your database server. In this series of videos, you’ll learn how the SQL Server engine looks at your indexes and builds your query results. In 90 minutes…

How about a nice cup of Standard Edition?

Free Downloads for Powerful SQL Server Management

Last Updated January 31, 2019

Brent Ozar

Production Database Administration, Videos

You’re responsible for managing and troubleshooting SQL Server. Good news: you’re not alone. The SQL Server community has banded together and built a bunch of cool stuff to help you do your job easier. In a one-hour session today for the PASS DBA Fundamentals online user group (free to join, of course), I showed some off.…

Upcoming Free Training Webcasts

Last Updated January 16, 2019

Brent Ozar

Videos

Hey, wanna learn about SQL Server for free? Feb 7 – PASS Data Expert Series: PASS is taking the top-rated Summit 2018 recordings and replaying them live, for free, on a webcast. I’ll be in the chat room too, taking your questions. Register here, and the lineup includes: SSMS & T-SQL Tricks with Bob Pusateri…

[Video] Office Hours 2019/1/2 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated January 5, 2019

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Videos

This week, Brent, Erik, Tara, and Richie discuss whether you need to premake a destination database in order to run sp_databaserestore, restoring production statistics on dev servers to simulate productions behavior, dealing with duplicate SPNs, tools for detecting all SQL Servers in a production environment, SQL performance monitoring, dealing with very large indexes, and Brent’s…

The Pleasure Of Presenting With Joe Obbish

Last Updated November 26, 2020

Erik Darling

Execution Plans, GroupBy Conference, Indexing, Videos

Grouple On At the December 2018 GroupBy I had the honor of co-presenting with one of the smartest guys around, Joe Obbish. Here’s the video of our session, “The Problems With Optional Operators”, and a link to the resources. Enjoy! Resources: Slides and Demos

[Video] Office Hours 2018/12/19 (With Transcriptions)

Last Updated December 22, 2018

Brent Ozar Unlimited Team

Videos

This week, Erik, Tara, and Richie discuss disaster recovery, Python vs C# for SQL Server, whether you should perform log backups on primary or secondary on AGs, why Postgres is so popular, using mount points for tempdb, attention events, database corruption, MERGE statements, restoring a table from a database, features they look forward to in…